Drawing Hearts
by Zayz
Summary: LJ. Her metaphorical heart was crafted with care, bright red encased in black boundary lines. She was only ever passionate within her limits. He was the one who made that change.


A/N: You know, I've been working on this damned multi-chaptered thing from last year for so long, I don't even know how to do something quick and easy anymore. It's depressing. So this is just kind of like a welcome-back-to-oneshot-world kind of thing for me – easy, breezy, (but not beautiful, in case you guys were thinking Cover Girl) and sort of a pick-me-up before I head into this other longer, more complicated one-shot I'm fighting with at present.

Not meant to be an epic, just spur-of-the-moment. Keep that in mind as you adjust your expectations over here, okay?

Mood music: _Desire_, Ryan Adams.

Hope it's okay, then…

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**Drawing Hearts  
By: Zayz**

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When Lily was young and naïve, quirky and a little rough around the edges, she metaphorically drew a heart on a piece of parchment.

It was a fair size, though slightly larger than average, with fine lines drawn in a child's impatient hand. She tried to keep it neat, tried to make it perfect, but it wasn't in her nature to sweat the details. She dashed off the outline of the heart and colored it in, allowing her hand to roam free within its boundaries but never daring to cross the lines, as though predators awaited her quill where her self-drawn limits stopped.

She was a beautiful girl, with bright eyes and a bright mind, and she attracted several offers of courtship, some shy and some less so. Bright as she was, though, her judgment had the capacity to be flawed; and sometimes, she threw herself into harm's way, caught up in the moment rather than what lay outside her simplistic, transitory pleasure.

The color of her heart was vivid – red like boldness, red like her hair, red like sweet, sweet cherries. She practically jumped off the page, but she still never crossed her self-drawn boundaries, making sure the boys were clear on what was acceptable and what wasn't.

Lily was a vibrant girl, she truly was, and as her heart grew, expanding little by little, relationship by relationship, she became even more so. She was red like pepper, red like her hair, red like rich, rich blood. She didn't like holding out on the person she fancied – if anything, her tendency was to love them too hard – and she gave more than she took, while still becoming bigger and better than she had been before.

Of course, it wasn't always easy. Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, when blood thumped in her ear and she didn't know what right-side-up was, she yelled something she didn't mean and a relationship broke – and with it, so did she. She shattered everywhere, lines broken cleanly through the middle, red spilling out everywhere, so much red. It took a while to gather herself back up, bruised and tender as she was.

And then there was that boy – that trouble-making, messy-haired, obnoxious but equally passionate boy – who had a different effect on her altogether.

James – that trouble-making, messy-haired, obnoxious but equally passionate James – had a tendency of inflaming this poor little metaphorical heart of hers, from almost the first time he met her. He made her shake; he made her stumble. He made her hand jerk and let some red out of the black lines around her heart. She hated him for it, hated how he made her break her rules, and she was quick to erase the fringes, leaving her heart as clean as it was before he tread upon it.

He hit her red in a unusual way – made her red like fury, like passion – and he made her whole world spin. He upset her, but he also made her laugh, laugh so hard she couldn't hear herself anymore. He drove her up the wall as no one else could, but he was always the first to apologize, even if he knew she wasn't going to accept it.

He added depth and variance to the red of her heart: the ugly maroon shadows that came on the flip-side of passion; the sweeter pinkish-red that came from softly watching, saying everything without words; the flash of unearthly red that came like lightning when she was so angry she could kill him. She knew greater ranges of emotion in his company, as their bond ebbed and flowed, leaped and crawled, dipped and soared. In all the various relationships she tried to maintain, he was the one constant, blowing her mind with the things he could say in just the right way, making her heart stop and restart itself. It was kind of amazing, the things he made her feel.

It took her long enough, as her friends constantly chorused and complained, but she did eventually realize that she couldn't live without him. All these layers, all these intricacies…difficult though they could be and often were, she realized they were central to who she was. She needed him like she needed air, water, sunlight, and the day did pass when she found herself at a crossroad, needing to make a decision, right or left.

But by this point, that metaphorical heart of hers had changed. The black boundaries she had once lived by, gently shifted but never disturbed, had been shattered. Her red – always held back from its genuine capacity to fly – was free at last, spilling onto the page, past the page, wherever it wanted to go. And it was a new red this time – the red of an apple, the red of choice, the choice she had to make here, now or never.

Well, Lily – that young and naïve, quirky and rough-around-the-edges little girl now grown up – chose to say yes to that trouble-making, messy-haired, obnoxious but equally passionate James now grown up; and with this, a new metaphorical heart was drawn, so much bigger and grander than the one before it.

And this one had no boundary lines to speak of.

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See? Told you. Short, silly, easy, ridiculous. Nothing fabulous. But it entertained me for a little while, so I figured I'd take a stab at entertaining you too.

As always, I am not sure what your opinion is of this, so please let me know with brutal honesty – just make sure you phrase it gently enough for this little earnest heart of mine.

Cheers.


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